SWS Mini Task in Publishing and Linking Data

Getting your data on the Semantic Web is as simple as putting a text file containing some triples on a server.

FOAF

FOAF is the friend-of-a-friend ontology. It's a small set of terms used for describing people... and the connections between them. For example:

@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
@prefix pos: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#> .

<http://rhiaro.co.uk/about#me>
  a foaf:Person ;
  foaf:name "Amy Guy" ;
  owl:sameAs <http://www.bbc.co.uk/things/e6a0941e-f964-4a78-a2ea-3d47c6405df6> ;
  foaf:img <https://en.gravatar.com/userimage/5236560/4c00a524a0fd157160742d80907349ae.png> ;
  foaf:homepage <http://rhiaro.co.uk>;
  foaf:workplaceHomepage <http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/students/Amy_Guy.html>; 

  foaf:account [
      a foaf:OnlineAccount ;
      foaf:accountServiceHomepage <http://twitter.com/> ;
      foaf:accountName "rhiaro"
  ];

  foaf:basedNear <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Edinburgh>, [
      a pos:Point;
      pos:lat "55.9531"^^xsd:float;
      pos:long "-3.1889"^^xsd:float

  ];

  foaf:knows   
    <http://www.bbc.co.uk/things/a2d48df4-79e9-4da6-8e0b-5a374c84ec72>, 
    <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Tomska> 
  .

If the external URIs in my FOAF profile are valid and set up correctly, an agent can follow links from my profile to other peoples', and further (the "follow your nose" technique of traversing linked data).

URIs

I made a URI for myself: http://rhiaro.co.uk/about#me. The domain is under my control, so I can make sure that it returns something appropriate to a browser or a script. If you own your own domain name, you can use that. But if not, you've always got http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/your-student-id/me.

Note: Your URI is not the URL of a file (the URL of a file is the URI of the file). Because you personally cannot be fetched over HTTP, your URI doesn't need to return anything (fragment # URIs or content negotation (below) are the alterntatives).

Publishing your profile

Once you've picked a URI, write a FOAF profile in your favourite text editor. You can amend the one above. You could add links, using the correct ontology terms and URIs, to topics you're interested in, places you've travelled, books you've read. All of these links can be traversed to build up a fuller picture, without you having to publish all of the data yourself; you only need to create the connections.

Save it as foaf.ttl. You can put it on the server space provided to you by Informatics, by dumping it in the /public/homepages/<user>/web folder on your DICE machine.

Now when you visit http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/your-student-id/foaf.ttl your triples will be returned (or mangled by the browser - try view-source if they look weird)!

Linking with your friends

Add foaf:knows links to the URIs of other people you know in the SWS class who have set up their FOAF profiles. Then we can visualise the lot of you. (If you don't know anyone else in the class, you can either talk to someone in the next lecture and get their URI, or link to: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s1158216/me).

Content negotiation

You can put a .htaccess file in your homepages web root. You can use this to return something different depending on the HTTP request.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /your-student-id

# Serve foaf.ttl when RDF (turtle) is requested
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} ^.*text/turtle.*
RewriteRule ^me$ foaf.ttl [R=303,L]

# Serve html by default 
RewriteRule ^me$ profile.html [R=303,L]

Save this as .htaccess in your /web folder alongside your foaf.ttl file and don't forget to create profile.html as well (see http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s1158216/profile.html for an example).

Now try visiting http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/your-student-id/me in a browser. You should be redirected to profile.html.

Now try curl -L -H "Accept: text/turtle" http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/your-student-id/me at the command line. Your RDF should be returned. (The -L flag tells curl to follow redirects and the -H flag lets you pass the Accept header).

Validation

Validate your foaf file check it is syntactically correct. There are many validators, you could try this one ('translate' from N3 to N3). Fix any syntax errors that may occur.

Adapted from Amy Guy's original version.